Books

Stan Bevington recently got a phone call from his sister. She told him he needed to come out and clean underneath his bed. What she meant was that the family’s cabin, near Alberta Beach, was overflowing with books that Bevington had published over the past half-century, ever since he founded the indie stalwart Coach House Press in Toronto in 1965.

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Tracey Lindberg’s debut novel Birdie (HarperCollins) is many things: a sharp yet big-hearted story of resiliency and transformation, an intense psychological novel diffused across a group of like-minded Cree women, a vision quest with a twist. It’s poetic and at times surreal, with short, potent fables and dream sequences bookending each chapter.

Shortly after Edin Viso opened his first bookstore in Sarajevo, someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the front window. Two months later, an angry man came into the shop and shoved a gun in Viso’s mouth.

Find a bookstore with an “Eastern Spirituality” shelf, and there will be a copy of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching on it. That 80-page, maddeningly obscure book is Taoism to most people. To the scholar of Chinese religion, though, Taoism is something more like the 48-volume edition of the Taoist Canon. Do most of us need that many books about the Tao? No, but supplementing your collection with the Chuang Tzu — the most goofily lyrical series of meditations that archaic China ever produced — is a good idea.

The week leading up to Halloween is hellish for Hugh Argyll. His mother, a famous actress, is dying and his ex-girlfriend is pilfering her clothes; his neighbour’s wife has killed herself and her young son; his best friend/foster brother has announced his engagement to an insufferable narcissist; and his foster sister is cracking up because her marriage is in trouble.

Patti LaBoucane-Benson has a PhD in human ecology. She is a recipient of the Aboriginal Role Model of Alberta Award for Education. For nearly 20 years she’s worked for Native Counselling Services of Alberta, currently serving as its director of research, training, and communication. Her work has also led to multiple public-speaking gigs, such as at Edmonton’s first Walrus Talks event, entitled Aboriginal City, which took place last month. In other words, LaBoucane-Benson’s understanding of First Nations affairs runs deep, and it has many possible outlets. But when it came time for her to think about publishing the dissertation work she completed at the University of Alberta — focusing on healing and resilience in indigenous families and communities — she knew right away which avenues she didn’t want to pursue.

Scott Hay’s world blew apart the day his mother killed his father as he lay soaking in the bathtub. Susanne Hay shot her sometimes-abusive husband Bruce with a hunting rifle in December 1997 at their farm home near Falun, 80 kilometres south of Edmonton.

To my mind, Winterkill is the proverbial dark horse of this year’s Alberta Readers’ Choice Award finalists. Among the five books in the running, it’s the lone young-adult book, and its creator, Kate Boorman, is the lone debut author (and lone woman) vying for the $10,000 prize.

Marina Endicott has had Hugh on her mind for nearly 20 years. The protagonist of her new novel, Close to Hugh, first crept out of her imagination and onto a page back in 1995 or 1996, while Endicott was teaching in Cochrane, Alta.

Vivek Shraya has a trick he uses to break the ice at parties. First, the author and artist, who now lives in Toronto, waits until he finds a fellow Edmonton ex-pat. (This, he says, never takes long.) Then he asks them one simple question: “What’s your favourite mall?”